Haskell Weekly News: July 23, 2008

Welcome to issue 78 of HWN, a newsletter covering
developments in the Haskell community.

Issue 78: In Which Michi and Neil Become Doctors, Sun
Donates Some Sweet Loot, and Jules Is Revealed To Be A Helpful
Anthropomorphic Robot

Community News

Congratulations
are in order this week to two members of the community who have
completed PhDs. Neil Mitchell (ndm) passed his PhD viva last
week, subject to minor corrections. Mikael Johansson (Syzygy-) has
also completed his PhD and will soon be starting a postdoc at Stanford with
the topology in computer science working group. Congratulations, Drs. Mitchell
and Johansson!

Announcements

list-extras 0.1.0. wren ng thornton (koninkje)
announced
the initial release of list-extras, a home for common
not-so-common list functions.

Sun Microsystems and Haskell.org joint project on OpenSPARC. Duncan
Coutts (dcoutts)
announced
a joint project
between Sun Microsystems and the Haskell.org community to exploit
the high performance capabilities of Sun's latest multi-core OpenSPARC systems via Haskell! Sun has
donated a powerful 8 core SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server to the Haskell
community, and $10,000 to fund a student to further develop support for
high performance Haskell on the SPARC. The student will work with a mentor
from Haskell.org and an adviser from Sun's SPARC compiler team. If you're a
student and this sounds interesting to you, send in those applications!!

Hayoo! beta 0.2. Timo B.
announced
the second beta release of Hayoo!, a Haskell API search
engine providing advanced features like suggestions, find-as-you-type,
fuzzy queries and much more. The major change in this release is the
inclusion of all packages available on Hackage in the index.

Haskell-beginners mailing list. Benjamin L. Russell
announced
the creation of the Haskell-Beginners
Mailing List, beginners at haskell.org, devoted to discussion of
primarily beginner-level topics related to Haskell. It's already off to
a great start, so if you're a Haskell beginner, or someone interested in
answering beginner questions, please subscribe!

Haskeline 0.2. Judah Jacobson
announced
the initial (alpha-ish) release of Haskeline,
a library for line input in command-line programs. It is similar in purpose
to editline or readline, but is written in Haskell and thus (hopefully)
more easily used in other Haskell programs.

Google Summer of Code

Generic tries. Jamie Brandon
is working on a library for efficient maps using generalized tries. This
week, he ran QuickCheck on his test suite for the first time, and
found a large number of failing tests! He's got his work cut out for
him straightening those out over the next few days.

DPH physics engine. Roman Cheplyaka (Feuerbach)
is working on a physics engine using Data
Parallel Haskell. This
week, he implemented full handling of rigid body collisions, including
angular velocity. Next he plans to explore various ways to make the engine
faster, including broad-phase collision detection.

GHC plugins. Max Bolingbroke
is working on dynamically loaded plugins for GHC. This
week, he revealed his "mystery project":
an HTML pretty-printer for GHC core! Here
is a sample. Now his focus turns to tidying things up and solidifying
documentation in preparation for getting his patches merged into GHC
HEAD.

Hoogle 4. Neil Mitchell (ndm)
is working on Hoogle 4. This
week, he fleshed out the final part of type search, including support
for instances and alpha renaming of variables. Unfortunately, it uses
too much memory to be feasibly run on the base libraries! Neil has some
ideas on how to fix this, however, which he plans to tackle next week.

Language.C. Benedikt Huber (visq)
is working
on Language.C, a standalone parser/pretty printer
library for C99. He has finally completed a working
implementation for analysing declarations and definitions, and presents
a working example of the library's use.

Discussion

Point-free style in guards. L29Ah
asked
a question about using a points-free style in guard expressions, leading
to a number of clever suggestions involving custom combinators.

Optimizing sequence. Gracjan Polak
started a discussion
on the strictness properties of the sequence function, and its implications
for optimization. It sounds as though adding an alternate strict version
of sequence to the libraries could be a good idea.